In the life sciences, study into reaction to external stimuli is a key area of research. Such research is called signaling pathway research. To generate such signaling pathways, signaling pathways are built by confirming and extending interaction between proteins based on individual biological experiments. KEGG, BioCarta, BioCyc and the like provides information for signaling pathways which is collected and databased.
To confirm biological facts, it is key to extend pathways or establish a hypothesis for new interaction in pathways based on signaling pathways discovered from prior studies. To support this, simulation is conducted using a numerical analysis method. As a representative example, there is ordinary differential equation (ODE) analysis, which is broadly used in metabolic engineering, for a metabolic network. However, since a rate constant of chemical reaction for interaction between each protein in a signaling process is not known in most cases, applicability of ordinary differential equation (ODE) analysis is limited.
Therefore, although all information is not known, the need for technology which may simply design and simulate a biological network is emerging.